The new tea party bible

“Rules for Radicals,” the iconic liberal organizing manifesto by Saul Alinsky, was an unlikely bible for tea party activists as they tried to mobilize their movement last year. Now, as they struggle to demonstrate their impact and staying power, they have another unlikely book to live by — a kind of management guide written by a couple of Stanford MBAs that extols the virtues of decentralization.

“The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations,” has a thesis with understandable attraction for tea partiers — that poorly funded groups and companies loosely organized around basic shared ideas can change society, often by outmaneuvering governments or mega-corporations.

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The title is based on the contrasting biology of spiders, which die when their heads are chopped off, and starfish, which can multiply when any given part is severed — a trait the book’s authors posit is shared by decentralized entities ranging from Alcoholics Anonymous to Al Qaeda to Wikipedia.

The book was first published in 2006 — three years before the tea party movement burst onto the scene with mass protests against what it regarded as President Barack Obama’s unchecked expansion of government. But the idea that scrappy starfish groups can beat imposing spider institutions resonates deeply with tea partiers, who have vigilantly enforced their occasionally chaotic structure against would-be leaders, an eager GOP, and conventional Washington wisdom questioning whether an infrastructureless group can succeed in Big Money electoral politics.

“This book is about what happens when there’s no one in charge,” write the book's authors, Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom. “It’s about what happens when there’s no hierarchy. You’d think there would be disorder, even chaos. But in many arenas, a lack of traditional leadership is giving rise to powerful groups that are turning industry and society upside down.”

The book has become something of a secret password for tea party activists seeking to weed out 'wannabe' tea party leaders or establishment types seeking to install a top-down structure on the movement, according to Jenny Beth Martin, a tea party patriots founder.

“When I ask people in D.C. whether they’ve read ‘The Starfish and the Spider,’ that is kind of a litmus test that I’ve found is very effective for whether they actually get what tea party patriots is doing,” said Martin, who heard about the book from Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the founder of a new tea party group of her own. “Some congressmen have read it, others haven’t, and you can really tell the difference between those who have read it and those who haven’t.”

The book is required reading for new hires at FreedomWorks, the nonprofit group that has emerged as a Washington bulkhead of sorts for tea party activists across the country.

“‘The Starfish and the Spider’ was almost written for this leaderless movement,” said Adam Brandon, spokesman for FreedomWorks. “You take the Dayton tea party, and you cut it in half, and it becomes two of them — and that’s what’s been happening. It’s a better model for the type of activism we want to do. So we talk about it a lot. We recommend it.”